Read the StamformAdvocate’s article.

“Latham & Watkins is a January bonus player who understands the pain of waiting while your peers at other firms celebrate holiday bonuses. So again this year, Latham is offering a sliding scale of bonuses that top the market base for most associates.” reports Joe Patrice in the Above The Law Biglaw.

According to a Latham memo providing the median and top bonuses by class year there was a bump for the big revenue firm. Bonus payments kicked in at a 1900-hour minimum.

Read the article.

“The beginning of a new year is the perfect time for busy lawyers to take stock of last year’s achievements and to establish plans for being SMART about business development in the coming months. To maximize your business development time, my question to you is: are you being SMART about it? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time Sensitive. A key benefit to the SMART framework is that you are concentrating time on the most essential areas of your business development activities. SMART provides you with focus, so you can actually achieve your goals.” advises Jason Levin in the Above the Law Career Center.

He briefly goes through the SMART framework.

Read the article.

Suzie Scanlon Rabinowitz writes in the ABA Journal that “Both the perception of and reality for women attorneys is disheartening. According to the National Association for Law Placement, women accounted for 20% of equity law firm partners in 2018. That’s while women have constituted about half of law school graduates for the past 20 years, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on advancing women’s professional progress. By many other key metrics, the law is still male-dominated, especially at its highest levels.”

“In a profession where cultural change happens at a creeping pace, how can we change the perception—and the reality—that success for women at the upper echelons is the exception, rather than the rule? Just as important, how can we elevate the practice of law by fostering diversity in the profession?”

Read the article.

“Federal prosecutors allege that a former Morrison & Foerster office operations manager spent more than $400,000 on the firm’s credit card to make personal purchases and transfer money to his PayPal account.” reports Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.

“The former employee, Andrew Robertson, faces a preliminary hearing at the end of the month in Washington, D.C., on a federal mail fraud charge.”

“Robertson is accused of spending money on personal purchases that included designer clothing, jewelry, home furnishings, groceries, his Verizon bill and storage units for his personal items.”

Read the article.

Time reports that Michael Avenatti is “being imprisoned in the same chilly cell that once held drug kingpin El Chapo, his lawyer said.”

“Avenatti was put in the most secure section of the federal facility under special administrative measures designed to cut off his communications with the outside world, Srebnick said. The special housing unit has held dozens of terrorism defendants over the past quarter century.”

“His cell, reportedly once occupied by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has an officer posted outside it around the clock and two cameras focused on him.”

Read the Time‘s article.

The 2020 Lateral Partner Satisfaction Survey, released by legal search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, reveals that the top reason for law firm partners to make lateral moves is lack of confidence in firm management and strategy.

“The next most-often cited reasons were a lack of support to build their practice (about 35%), dislike of their firm’s culture (about 31%) and compensation (about 31%). The lawyers were allowed to choose more than one factor,” reports the  ABA Journal.

The survey also shows that many partners are making life-changing decisions with very little due diligence.

Read the survey.

Read the  ABA Journal‘s report.

Above the Law reports that Reed Smith has announced a global Mental Health Task Force to help Reed Smith’s team address mental health issues as they arise.

Partner Kimberly Gold, inaugural chair of the task force, describes the firm’s plan:

“The mission of this task force is to ensure that our lawyers and professional staff have access to help whenever they or their family members experience or are at risk of experiencing mental health or substance use issues. We will also challenge the well-documented stigma surrounding these issues and cultivate a workplace culture that promotes psychological wellness and positive help-seeking behaviors.”

Read the Above the Law article.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the law firm and legal services technology company Atrium plans to lay off an undisclosed number of in-house attorneys in a bid to restructure the San Francisco startup.

CEO Justin Kan posted in the company’s blog that Atrium “will keep a small group of partners in-house who will serve our clients with strategic services like financing and (mergers and acquisitions), as well as work with our network of vetted and trusted firms to deliver general corporate legal services.”

The company provides legal and business services to startups, charging them on a subscription basis, according to the Chronicle‘s Chase DiFeliciantonio.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

Bloomberg Law takes a look at the hundreds of Kirkland & Ellis hard-working, non-share partners who live in a sort of limbo—a solid step above associate status, but still well-short of achieving the coveted position of equity partner, where they are able to share in the firm’s largesse.

Bloomberg’s Roy Strom explains:

“It’s an exchange that helps fuel the bottom line at one of the world’s richest law firms: Kirkland gets non-share partners’ blood, sweat, and tears, and billable hours. And in return, non-share partners bank on the experience and contacts gained at Kirkland in hopes that despite the significant blow of not getting coveted Kirkland shares, they can land well elsewhere.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Bloomberg Law is reporting that Troutman Sanders and Pepper Hamilton have voted to merge, creating a 1,100-lawyer firm with offices in 23 cities known as Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders.

Current Troutman managing partner Steve Lewis will become chair and CEO of the combined firm, and Pepper Hamilton chair Tom Gallagher will become vice chair.

“Troutman is the larger of the two firms, taking in nearly $525 million in revenue in 2018—good for 68th most among U.S. law firms, according to the latest AmLaw rankings,” writes Bloomberg’s Roy Strom.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

More than 20 percent of associates at Texas-based litigation powerhouse Susman Godfrey will have total compensation of at least $500,000 for 2019, the firm announced.

Above the Law reports on the firm’s new scale:

“Susman has a history giving out massive bonuses. 2019 has brought another year of big bonuses at the firm. But they didn’t just repeat the big bonuses from last year, they actually added to them.”

Bonuses range as high as $235,000 for Susman Godfrey associates in the 2011 law school graduation class.

Read the Above the Law article.

The ABA Journal reports that a Biglaw partner who relied on her assistant to create first-draft billing records based on her work product has been suspended for six months for overbilling.

The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers sought a two-year suspension for Boston lawyer Doreen Zankowski for her billing practices when she was at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr. The firm had opened an investigation after Zankowski told her department chair that she worked 3,173 billable hours and more than 720 nonbillable hours in 2015, according to the opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court justice hearing the case.

Zankowski conceded to a hearing committee that “her billing practices were inadequate, careless, rushed and error-prone,” according to the justice’s finding.

Read the ABA Journal article.

A forecast from Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group and Hildebrandt Consulting expects law firm revenue growth to rise between 5.5% and 6% in 2020.

The Citi 2020 client advisory offers this partial overview:

“Looking forward, we know that many firms are concerned about the risk of a recession and the underlying macroeconomic and geopolitical volatility. However, we do not anticipate a recession in 2020. That said, we believe it is now prudent for law firms to prepare for less certain times ahead. We also note that firms are facing many talent-related challenges: retention at all levels, the rising cost of talent, and how best to plan for the departure of rainmakers and senior partners.”

Read the Citi report.

Littler has launched an initiative to advance nonbinary gender inclusiveness within the firm, according to a release from the firm.

Internally, the firm is providing resources to employees that outline suggested practices for handling matters that involve nonbinary individuals whose gender identities are beyond the two categories of “male” or “female.” Gender-based pronouns will be eliminated from human resources documents, including handbooks, and employees will have the option of choosing a nonbinary identifier in the firm’s internal HR system. In addition, the firm is standardizing email signature blocks including the addition of a voluntary option to include preferred-pronoun identification.

Additionally, marketing collateral and other external materials will be made gender-neutral.

“An important part of gender identity is the pronouns we choose. By being mindful of others’ preferred pronouns and by proactively sharing our own preferred pronouns, we can help to ensure that we respect one another’s gender identity and avoid misgendering people,” said Tom Bender and Jeremy Roth, co-managing directors of Littler, in a joint statement. “In conjunction with broader efforts as part of our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we’re confident that these initial steps will further foster a more welcoming and inclusive environment for our employees and clients.”

Associates at Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz can thank management for setting a standard-breaking bonus scale for Biglaw associates, according to a report by Above the Law.

The firm, with offices in Washington, Los Angeles and New York, set a bonus scale that is 1.5 times the going market rate. Above the Law senior editor Staci Zaretsky writes that this is the fourth time the firm has beaten the market on bonuses since it opened four years ago.

Senior associates and those in the class of 2012 are in line for bonuses of $150,000.

Read the Above the Law article.

Jones Day has filed a motion seeking sanctions against plaintiffs who filed a $200 million lawsuit alleging that the law firm discriminates based on gender and motherhood, reports the ABA Journal.

The firm alleges in the sanctions motion that the plaintiffs made up the lawsuit’s pay-bias claims “out of whole cloth” and seeks their dismissal, writes the Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss. Jones Day also is seeking an order for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to pay fees and costs that the firm spent to litigate the motion.

Jones Day has claimed that the plaintiffs in the original suit wrongly assumed that female associates at the firm were paid less than their male counterparts.

Read the  ABA Journal article.

Above the Law has a report on BTI Consulting Group’s latest 2020 Client Service A-Team report — the report designed to show which law firms are tops in 17 different client-service-related activities.

The four basic categories considered in the survey include: understanding the client’s business, uniformity of service, dealing with unexpected changes, unprompted communication, and anticipating clients’ needs.

The article lists the 30 Biglaw firms that were mentioned most often across all categories, starting with Jones Day at the top of the list.

Read the Above the Law article.

Bloomberg Law reports that Armstrong Teasdale LLP’s mandatory partner retirement policy doesn’t violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act because partners aren’t covered employees, the Eighth Circuit ruled, deciding a matter of first impression.

The court said equity partner Joseph S. von Kaenel wasn’t a firm “employee” when he was forced to retire at age 70.

The court relied on a precedential six-factor test for determining who is an employee, including whether the organization can fire the individual and set rules for the individual’s work, how much the employer supervises the work, and whether the individual shares in profits, explains Bloomberg’s Julie Steinberg.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Goodwin Proctor has announced an expanded paid parental leave policy for employees in its U.S. offices, reports Above the Law.

The new policy gives lawyers up to 18 weeks paid parental leave, while staff will be eligible to take at least 12 weeks. And birth mothers will be eligible to take at least six additional weeks of disability leave, according to the announcement sent to employees.

The firm also announced that lawyers will move to a flexible vacation policy, with no specified limit to the total number of vacation days in a calendar year.

Read the Above the Law article.